funds - how specific do you get

Courtney Klein 2

I was hired to restructure the data entry system at my organization. For many years they have used funds and appeals in a crazy way. Exmaple - Board is a fund and each membership level has its own fund.



Please, please confirm for me that that is insane.



Secondly, we have a specific ballet school for students. The school itself is all encompassing and supports programming, certified teachers, tuition and living expenses, transportation, tutoring, physical therapy, rehearsal tutus, pointe shoes, uniforms and emergency funding.  Is it necessary to create a seperate fund for scolarships? I guess I should first ask is scholarships are different from tuition but either way, I would love feedback.



Courtney

JoAnn Strommen

I've heard of some orgs that have 'board' funds.  You may want to read book "Fundraising with The Raiser's Edge" by Bill Connors.  He outlines some examples of Campaign/Fund/Appeal structures.  We didnt' adopt everything as it didn't all fit well for us but was good to consider. 



Some orgs have separate fund for each scholarship, others don't.  You have options to mark campaigns/funds etc as restricted.  Without a lot more info on how your org is structured and why each membership has their own fund, it's hard to advise.  Structure used can depend on how you need to pull data/reports.  I would think you could pull membership level by other data on the records. 



With the ballet school are you entering tuition in RE?  It sounds like you are trying to track what to me would be accounting functions in RE, not fundraising.  I think you will need to meet with your powers that be and accounting office to determine what you are trying to record/track in RE.



My 2 cents....

Milly Whittington

My two cents, too.  You COULD get rich here.  :-)

Also recommend Bill Connors' book.  Easy to read.

Our organization uses:

1. Appeals for how the donation came in  (direct mail, unsolicited, event, membership)
2. Funds for how the $ will be granted/spent, so we get as specific as the donor does (accountability)
   • If the tuition you're tracking is gifts to pay for students' tuition the fund would be a good place. If someone wants to know how much was raised for pointe shoes and you have a pointe shoes fund, the reporting would be simple.
   • We only use RE to track donations, not accounts receivable.  So, the payment of tuition would not be in our RE.  
3. Campaigns as an bigger umbrella (site, capital campaign, etc), making it easy to track goals for them.
4. Packages as a subset of the appeal (level of membership/sponsorship)

We track our Board members on the Constituent Code (Bio2)

 

Nicole S

I think that first and foremost has anyone who set anything up at your organization in the past had any rationale or even a basic understanding of campaigns, funds, appeals, and packages?  I ask this because I worked somewhere and assumed they had both and understanding and a rationale and they had neither.  Which meant that the previous "structure" was illogical and irrelevant.  I basically had to start from scratch.



I try to think of everything in these terms: do I need to specify this way or can we easily qyery on it with another method?  Case in point, all gifts over $1000 we getting a specific fund.  Not because they were restricted or special in any way, but because they wanted to be able to easily group them.  Well, they made all of their reporting a little more complicated because no one realized they could just query on "gifts over $1000".



You can also give each gift a constiuent code on the misc (second) tab or the gift.  So day to day in honor of or ticket purchases of a board member would be coded as "individual" or whatever, but the annual board gift is coded as "board".  We do also have an appeal for board.  But I find the need to have a board fund unnecessary.  But you need to figure that our based on how/what you guys want to report on.



On memberhship -- I've done it 2 ways at the same org for a reason.  Membership that was based on giving level had a program and could go to any fund (basically).  But membership to a certain program was restriced and had a fund and campaign.  This was because that program had separtate goals and events.  IT was helpful to track this way.